Wednesday, July 11, 2012

We prefer to have a direct relationship with our users, measuring and processing their feedback to best continue on our next steps. A result of this style is that we don't fit cleanly into old, traditional milestones.

Some might say we're not even in alpha, yet we're a live product. Our online service is even getting actual user feedback!

Labels aren't important, so we're going to simply wield them in a manner useful for development. Here's what we're near.

Accounts for users.

Creations being saved on a user account.

Creations being saved and available for viewing by other users.

Again, we're already a live product and defying the conventional model for software development by being so transparent. With the above, we want people to visit and feel like their presence is continued beyond a single session -- eventually beyond a single device or machine.

In video games, that level of tracking feedback, user engagement, and deployment is part of a beta.

Signing Up

Artist Accounts and Creations

While other services have "usernames", you are an artist within our service. In our current vision, artists have a reputation based on actions within our service.

Is this an artist that creates good works?

Has this artist judged good works toward the notoriety they deserve?

To that end, our first trials into this back-end will consist of saving your works and giving you a representation for your reputation. Beta users will also be given an indicator that distinguishes them from others as the true early adopters they are.

For reasons that we legally suspect but aren't clear about, we need to be absolutely safe about this part.

Anything you create will be saved on our databases.

This may get tricky in terms of "ownership". We do not intend to blatantly sell your music or betray your trust,

but please note that we do not owe you anything

in any way

and that using our service means

you're totally fine with us having the creations you make with our service.

Don't let unknown worries stop you: if you're the type to care that much about ownership and usage, you're exactly the kind of intense user we want to make happy throughout this account development. Talk to us.

We're still small! You can EASILY get in touch with the developers (email, twitter, G+, etc.) if you have any questions or concerns.

Kickstarter

We will be putting the notation creation component on Kickstarter for funding. Thank you to all the individuals offering to help film a video for this endeavor!

If you know of a boy and a girl -- around ages 5-11-- that can read and recite lines effectively, please let us know if they can say some lines for a video. We'll show you the storyboard and discuss more details.

Filming goes on the weekend of July 20th (Friday) and July 21st (Saturday).

Want to contribute? Just let us know what you can do. Here's what we're planning.

- Filming (outdoors, at this time)

- Recording of Dialog

- Recording of Audio*

- Video Editing

* We really could use help with this, especially if you have equipment for recording music.

Tyrone Pham, early adopter...

... and part of the resourceful
ragtag filmmakers team from El Monte,
KidsWithSticks.

A New Name for the Service?

Back when we were still thinking of being in the space of composition software, we had come upon the name "InNotation". While currently we're fine with referring to the composition component by this name, our service as a whole offers a networked judgment of high-quality music works. InNotation doesn't describe that part of our dream.

In German, "lied" literally means "song", with "lieder" being a set of these "art songs". In competitions, a leaderboard shows the ranked competitors of an activity -- whether it's sports or video games.

Our service will be a leaderboard of musical greats, works that are competitively ranked by the very musicians best qualified to judge them. In other words, it will be a "liederboard".

You can now access our iterations at liederboard.com. If you can think of a better name for the service, please feel free to share!

We are deeply grateful to the early adopter Mei Francis. She's the spectacular marketing coordinator that freely gave the idea for this name.

A Metronome!

This week's build brings with it an indicator for the beats and a tweak to the input.

We were able to write out quarter notes reliably with this new system and the metronome. Give it a shot yourself at liederboard.com!

... And the Beat Goes On...

The most common reaction from writing out rhythms is that artists want to hear what they've written. For week 11, we have playback as the top feature to implement.

We also want to hear what you have to say about the metronome! Leave a comment here or keep using the early adopter groups.

Research is going on with setting up the backend for the account development that will mark our beta period. We hope you're as excited as we are to be able to save your works!